


Ridge Fire

by Mangacat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dark, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 13:36:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mangacat/pseuds/Mangacat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam Winchester is not afraid of fire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ridge Fire

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I do not claim ownership to any and all materials recognizably belonging to the show Supernatural, nor am I making money off of using them for my own fannish pleasures.
> 
> Warnings/Spoilers: show-style dark imagery, set S6-ish.
> 
> A/N: So, apparently, this continues my line of Sam Winchester character pieces, which oddly enough seem to have started with my writing career in SPN-fic as I notice in hindsight. And when I actually got up to start working on this year’s hc_bingo line, this popped up for the square ‘fire’, cheers, I'm still alive.

Sam Winchester is not afraid of fire.  
He hasn’t kept track of all the hunts he’s been on in his life, countless people saved and monsters killed, but he knows that restless spirits were by far the most common, if most of the time easily thwarted threat of the supernatural world. Fire has been a part of his life in good ways and bad ways for literally as long as he can remember. Sometimes he felt dread, like when the dreams first started, long ago, about Jess. When he didn’t yet know that it was a future marked to become and not a nightmare that felt like a memory.  
But fire is also pure, and the comforting crackle of flames that had filled so many nights in his youth, him and Dean standing over an open grave long past the point of a spirit dissipating into thin air in their own kind of reverence and supplication, they are still burnt in his thoughts.

Sam Winchester is not afraid of fire.  
Fire is a servant that has saved their life and that of others so many times along the way, it’s an agent of change, of rebirth, of cleansing that means a new beginning for an old soul and the start of a cycle that is as natural as the moon and the tides. Once instead of lying back on the hood of the Impala and gazing at the stars, him and Dean had had their eyes drawn towards a ridge right next to the highway that glowed with the embers and wind-fanned flames of a brush fire. They were not worried that it would come close and threaten them, for they both knew that it was just nature’s way of cleaning up, debris, fallen leaves, dry stalks of grass that fell to ashes easily, making way for new green in a more fertile spring.

Sam Winchester is not afraid of fire.  
Even though he can see the match tremble between his fingers where his eyes tell him the skin is blacking and peeling off of melting flesh even though the cold whiff of winds slips over his hands in a small caress that feels completely normal. He can’t trust his eyes, can’t trust his mind and though he knows that he is not afraid of fire, never has been, his fingers are cramped around the burning match as if the hot glow of the burning wood reaching his fingertips is the only thing, that small burst of pain; that would make real what is actually real. Fire in Hell has a different quality than here on earth, it’s searing, clinging, it devours skin and flesh and bones and doesn’t stop, not until it reaches the soul and bites holes in it, deep and abiding. Holes that don’t heal like broken bones and ripped flesh.  
Sam is not afraid of earthly fire, because it has no bearing on the rememberance of agony from a lick of hellish flame. But something inside him doesn’t seem to realize and so he stands over an open grave and watches as the matches burn down to a crisp, to fuse ash and flesh in his hand.

The spell is broken when another hand comes to lie over his, light touch quelling the tremble of his fingers and finally getting them to open in a spasm that lets the matches fly into the salted bones and ignite them with a small breath of lighter fluid. Sam lifts his eyes from the burning bones and meets the shadowed gaze of his brother, whose face is bathed in flickering lights. Dean is not afraid of fire either, never has been, because it means the same to him. But he, too, knows what it means to be reborn from ash and brimstone and knows the wounds left in the fabric of his soul like the craters in burn-ravaged skin, like the dark and shadowed corner of your own mind.

Their hands stay intertwined as they stand and watch the remnants of a spirit burn away from this world to the next. They will never stop burning and they know, but they’re not afraid.  
Not ever.


End file.
